“Summer,” said a friend who co-runs a restaurant,” seems like it started four hours ago.”  That felt right for today is Thursday, and already the air is thicker.  The dahlias finally got planted, and staked,then removed, and replanted.  A funny story if you ask me in a few years. My favorite cartoon from the New Yorker is a man happily planting in a rooftop garden only to have his carrots stolen by a bunny with wings.  This isn’t a non sequitor if you knew the story about the dahlias.

Later while eating ice cream with another friend, we heard the first “F-ck you” from the traffic whizzing by, screamed by a man in a car to another diver.  What is summer then in a prettyhow tourist town than ice cream, neighbors, and traffic curse-outs?

But then there was the beach, the pretty beach with a shark warning, the ocean that seemed endless, the water that was cold, and the sand sticky on bare feet across the asphalt.